Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn

Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I’ll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.

Never underestimate the booberie of the booboisie.

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

There is no record in the history of a nation that ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.

People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police.

My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even…malicious.

It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.

Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes…. They are the supreme realists of the race.

Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.

Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.

The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.

The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey.

The true function of art is to edit nature and so to make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proofreader, blue-pencilling the bad spelling of God.

Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.

The businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

Of all the forms of visible otherworldliness, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently-and a good half of it is palpably worthless.

Self-respect–the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

The best years are the forties; after 50 a man begins to deteriorate, but in his forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.

A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it-this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.

All zoos actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.

A home is not a mere transient shelter its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.

Imagine the Creator as a stand-up comedian – and at once the world becomes explicable.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don’t want to meet them.

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

Every man is his own hell.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

It is the place where all the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.

The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother’s milk.

An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in.

A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity.

Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.

Perhaps the most valuable of all human possessions, next to an aloof and sniffish air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.

It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.

My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Whenever a husband and a wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner’s inquest.

Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.

No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.

Every autobiography…becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

Love is based on a view of women that is impossible to those who have had any experience with them.

The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.

Sunday school: a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Whenever A attempts by law to impose his moral standards on B, A is most likely a scoundrel.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

Tis always more blessed to give than to receive; for example, wedding presents.

Great artists are modest almost as seldom as they are faithful to their wives.

Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

Women do not like timid men. Cats do not like prudent rats.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

Creator. A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals.

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

Alimony: The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

The only American invention as perfect as a sonnet.